Republican News · Thursday 4 July 2002

Irish history by ballads

'Songs of Irish Rebellion'
by Georges Denis Zimmerman,
Four Courts Press (Dublin, 2002)
Price: € 2495 paperback

"Did that play of mine send out
Certain men the English shot."

WB Yeats, pondering the influence his nationalist play Cathleen ní Houlihan may or may not have had on the 1916 Easter Rising, captured the relationship in Ireland between poetry and action, art and life.

For centuries, that relationship has been fused in the common literature and folklore of those most disenfranchised by and disenchanted with the political ascendancy. The people who might never have enjoyed the works of Yeats, but were inspired by simple verse and crude emotion, are the people on whom Georges Denis Zimmerman's recently reprinted Songs of Irish Rebellion, Irish Political Street Ballads and Rebel Songs, 1780-1900, centres.

First published in Switzerland in 1966, its re-publication is a timely contribution to 'Irish studies'. All the world over, but most strikingly in Ireland, popular art has ever been the chosen weapon of oppressed peoples, sustaining and informing, directing the anguish of defeat and invoking that final day of triumph, the "Rising of the Moon".

Challenging the propaganda of Empire with their pockets of insight, Aogán Ó Rathaille, PH Pearse, Ernie O'Malley and Bobby Sands may be remembered more for their lyrics than their mastery of military strategy; in truth, both were 'inextricably linked'.

Fitting, then, that Zimmerman's seminal work should focus on cause and effect. I say seminal because his work is the sowing of a seed that demands far more attention from academia. Such is the "basic pupose" of Zimmerman's book, "to make available documents that historians might reassess; to begin the sizing up of a cultural phenomenon, and to consider a particular way of giving vent to feelings and convictions in a shape that made them memorable and effective".

Protesting, propagating, grieving, lamenting, inspiring - these songs might not be largely confined to the bookshelves were it not for the acute revisionism of the latter part of the last century, which viewed such material as academically, artistically and politically unworthy, even dangerous.

"Political songs in particular were out of favour for various reasons," Zimmerman, now emeritus professor at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, says of the 1960s' climate that greeted the original work. "They belonged to a sensitive area and some people in Ireland thought that such potentially harmful material would be as well forgotten."

People 'remembering to forget', to paraphrase Michel Foucault, is a trademark of the postcolonial psyche. Perhaps now is the time for remembering all that we have hidden away in the attic of Irish history.

Zimmerman's work, including another excellent recently published study, 'The Irish Storyteller', and studies of Yeats, Walter Scott and the Irish short story, is vital to this. He rightly contends that "scholarly attention tends to focus on what is safely distant in time". Ballads from the 19th century might run a little close to the bone.

Thematically, there are two main strands to Zimmerman's political ballads: the struggle of the Irish peasantry to seize posession of the land and the nationalism of the middle class "often intermingled with the efforts to obtain emancipation from the religious disabilities imposed on the majority". Popular and effective, "within the reach of the virtually illiterate", this particular form of propaganda was part literature and folklore - "a curious melting pot for different kinds of literature or subliterature".

Recurring motifs, themes, and a fairly complex system of symbols are the hallmark of a literary form that intertwined events and tragedies throughout the island into, at once, a singular diatribe against oppression, and a call to arms - "effect and cause at the same time".

Calling to mind the "SAM missiles in the sky" exhortations of some barstool republicans today, Zimmerman notes of their antecedents in the 19th Century that ballad singing "was sometimes denounced as an easy way to pose as a patriot and to pay lip-service to the cause".

Nevertheless, the ballads and broadsides act as "a running commentary on Irish life seen 'from below'". Akin to Terry Fegan's 'Monto', Tomás Ó Criomhthain's autobiography, or that of Maxim Gorky, we see a side of history in these ballads that is normally ignored.

However, ballads written 'from above' are also included in the edition, with a section on songs from the Orange tradition, with its "fundamental" opposition, as Zimmerman puts it, to class war:

"Let not the poor man hate the rich,
Nor rich on poor look down,
But each join each true Protestant
For God and for the Crown."

"Time and time again", Zimmerman notes, "Orangemen were accused of deliberately rousing the anger of the Catholic nationalist population; music played an important part in these provocations". Fast forward to the Short Strand today and not much has changed in the triumphalist repertoire.

Indeed, that music provoked, in his youth, the latterly nationalist WB Yeats. An Orange songbook, which he read in a hayloft in Sligo, fist gave him "the pleasure of rhyme", inspiring him with a desire to die "fighting the Fenians".

Arranged into sections of historical analysis, followed by reprints of the original ballads, Zimmerman's book illuminates a great deal about Irish society, past and present, by examining a very representative, popular form of art. It's not just an academic book, but an enjoyable read as well and will soon, I suspect, be standard text for those studying Irish history and literature.

Most importantly, it shows that Yeats may have been right in his assertion, however self-indulgent, that his poetry had an effect on the 1916 Rising, and that WH Auden, in his dismissive response, "In memory of WB Yeats...poetry makes nothing happen", was probably quite wrong.

BY MICHAEL PIERSE

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Kildare's republican legacy

'ON THE ONE ROAD; Political Unrest in Kildare 1913-1994'

By James Durney

Gaul House (Naas, 2001)

Price: €19.05 paperback

'On the One Road; Political Unrest in Kildare 1913-1994' is a study that, as Liam Kenny writes in the foreword, "challenges the depiction of the county as dominated by an allegiance to an Anglo-Irish political ideology - that Kildare was in some way paralysed by its position within or astride the Pale".

Kildare, in republican terms, is far more than an annual trip to Bodenstown. The extent of political unrest there was not largely confined either, to 1798. In 1914, in the "greatest nationalist meeting seen for some time", for example, 7,000 people gathered at the Gibbet Rath on the Curragh, with a march of 1,000 Irish Volunteers. Their ranks soon swelled to 6,000.

Companies of the Irish Volunteers from Maddenstown, Allen, Rathangan, Brownstown, Milltown, Nurney, Kilcullen, Ballymore-Eustace, Booleigh, Naas, Kildare and Newbridge all took part in the period of political upheaval. As time went on, invalided soldiers arrived home from the front and were recruited into the Volunteers.

John Devoy, Kildare native and head of the Republican Movement's covert organisation in America, Clan na Gael, assisted in fundraising efforts for the Irish Volunteers and negotiated for arms from Germany for the 1916 Rising. He was also involved in the Fenian rising of 1867, 50 years earlier. Devoy famously stated "Ireland's opportunity will come when England is engaged in a desperate struggle with some great European power or European combination".

Durney brings us through the experiences of Kildare republicans in Frongoch Internment Camp, the War of Independence and the Curragh and Rath camps. The successes of Domhnall Ua Buachalla and Denis Kilbride in North and South Kildare in the 1918 elections are examined. Various ambushes and operations are detailed compellingly. Kildare volunteers' involvement in the Spanish Civil War and somewhat more muted campaigns in the decades leading up to the resurgence of IRA activity in the late 1960s are also explained.

Durney deals with Bodenstown commemorations since then, using them as staging posts for an examination of more recent developments in the republican struggle, including the emergence of a renewed local IRA from the old guard of lifelong republicans in Kildare. Some study is provided on activity in the county up until 1994, though this is scant, more likely due to a lull in activism in the county than any omission on the part of the author.

Well produced, written and illustrated, On the One Road is a good general read and a must for Kildare republicans, for whom it is a source of invaluable information on a rich local history of radicalism.

BY MICHAEL PIERSE